


One More Day

by Eternal Scribe (Shadowcat)



Category: Charmed
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-24
Updated: 2012-09-24
Packaged: 2017-11-14 23:19:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/520549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowcat/pseuds/Eternal%20Scribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Where There Are Endings, There Are Savage Beginnings</i>
</p>
<p>What if something in Phoebe broke when she had to vanquish Cole? What if something broke in all of the Halliwells right in time for all hell to break lose... and Cole was the only one left standing after the smoke cleared?</p>
            </blockquote>





	One More Day

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a few years ago after hearing _"One More Day"_ by Diamond Rio for the first time in a long time when I was writing prompts for **Fanfic100** at LiveJournal and the next prompt on my list was _Death_.

Cole had barely opened his eyes when he felt the beginnings of pain. It started as a sharp, tearing pain that first settled into his chest. Then it burned and spread throughout his entire body. The pain was enough to make him cry out in shock. He looked around, trying to remember where he was and how long he had been there. Another instant of sharp pain and then a strange numbness started taking root deep in his chest. He sat up, looking around him. He was in the Underworld again.

“Phoebe...?” His voice echoed in the cavern. He fought down his panic when there was no response. "Bright One?"

There was still no response when he called for his soul mate ... and he then knew that the pain he was feeling had come from her. Her pain warred with his own anger. He'd kill whoever had hurt his beloved witch.

When he shimmered into the parlor of the Halliwell Manor, he could tell immediately that something was very wrong. It was cold ... and lifeless here. There were black scorch marks all along the walls and smudges of what looked like... blood. It looked like the walls had a lot of blood on them. There was no sign of anything living... and this started to panic him.

"Phoebe? Piper? Paige? Leo?"

It did not bode well that when he called out their names, one by one, only cold silence answered.

That's when the burning sensation intensified throughout his body and then it started to feel like part of him was draining away.

"PHOEBE!" he screamed as he tried to shimmer directly into the room they had once shared but instead, he was thrown back by an explosion of white light and when his vision cleared he was standing outside the door. He hesitantly touched the doorknob. When nothing happened, he turned it slowly and opened the door.

The moment he entered their room, pain and an icy sensation hit him. Phoebe was a strong empath and she also had started projecting as she gained more and more control of her powers. If she was projecting this strongly, this painfully, then something really bad must have happened. 

"Phoebe?" he whispered, praying to whatever deity or demon that was listening that he wasn't already too late.

 

_~Last Night I had a crazy dream_  
Wish was granted just for me,  
It could be for anything  
I didn't ask for money, or a mansion in Malibu  
I simply wished for one more day with you ...~ 

 

He moved through the small sitting room and into their master bedroom... and that's where he found her...

She was laid out in the middle of their bed, an antique athame through her heart. At first, he thought someone had killed his wife and left her there for him to find. He saw her hand hanging off the side of the bed and blood was dripping down her arm to puddle onto the floor. He gently grabbed her hand and saw the savage imprint of the athame's handle in her palm. It quickly became apparent that Phoebe hadn’t been murdered by some enemy. From the damage to her hand from the handle of the athame, she must have used some sort of spell to force herself to do what she had done.

"Phoebe...oh Phoebe, no..." he whispered with tears filling his eyes. 

He pulled the athame out of her chest and incinerated it. He then sat on the bed and drew her body tight against him, his tears falling on her face while her blood stained his chest.

He was too late.

If what he had felt upon waking was any indication, he was only a few minutes too late...but it was late enough. He had been too late to stop her from taking her own life.

"Why did you do it, love? Why, Phoebe, what made you choose death?" Cole was sobbing, but he didn't care and if anyone showed up, he was liable to incinerate them on sight. He was holding her too him when he saw an envelope on the bed. It had a few splotches of blood on it, and he stared at it a long while before he decided to reach for it. 

 

_~One more day, One more time_  
One more sunset maybe I'd be satisfied  
But then again; I know what it would do  
Leave me wishing still, for one more day with you... ~ 

 

Keeping Phoebe cradled on his lap, he slowly pulled out the folded sheets of paper that were therein. His hands shook as he recognized her handwriting.

 

_Dear Cole..._

_It's amazing, isn't it? You've been dead and gone from me for three years, yet it is to you that I write this last letter..._

_I tried, Baby, I really did. After I lost you... after I lost you I wanted so badly to just give up and die. It was like my heart was gone and my soul was completely empty. But I struggled to stay alive and functioning because my sisters needed me. It was becoming more and more important for the Power of Three to stay together and fight together._

_I’m really not even sure where to start, or where exactly everything started going wrong for the Charmed Ones. I know that after your death, Darryl was killed in the line of duty --- protecting us. It was awful, Cole. To Piper and I it was eerily reminiscent of when Andy died protecting us. You never met Andy, but we grew up with him, and he was Darryl’s partner. Anyway, Darryl stepped in when Piper got ambushed and protected her. However, he was hurt in the process and he died shortly thereafter._

_Then..._

_Then it became hell on earth as a war broke out not only between the demons in the underworld, but between the elders as well. We had two civil wars on our hands... and then the great big war between the sides. It was becoming insane and we were wearing ourselves out running all over the place trying to save what innocents we could save. Every time we would run to one scene to save an innocent, another one all the way across town would be killed._

_During all of this time, Paige, Piper and I were being very careful about leaving the manor at all. Apparently, the Underworld had put a price on my head since… well, they did know you were dead, after all. Because of this, , Leo and Paige would orb the two of us to wherever we needed to go and to bring us back to the Manor. We stayed hiding in the Manor for most of the time, Cole. We tried to stay out of the wars, but both factions ended up bringing the wars to us._

_Paige was the first to go. She had orbed Wyatt and Chris to safety and was coming back for me...but she was intercepted and...they killed her, Baby. They incinerated her while she was in mid-orb. In less than a minute, our sister was gone..._

 

"Oh sweetheart," Cole whispered as he cradled Phoebe's body close and let his tears drop onto her hair. Apparently he had been in stasis for a very long time if Phoebe had thought he was dead. "I didn't know, baby, I didn't know."

It was awhile before he could draw up the courage to reach for the last letter from his soul mate and continue reading.

 

_...Piper and I were devastated and in shock, but we weren't even allowed time to mourn. Leo had to get us out of there and to a safe house... because of the demon-led witch hunts. Yeah, demons had managed to stir shit up topside and a massive witch hunt was on our hands. After Paige was killed, the demons figured that Piper and I were stripped of our powers and would be easy to kill... or captured as trophies._

_We had no intentions of being trophies or prisoners of war. We were Halliwells and there was no way we were going to go down like that. We kept fighting because that is what we do, it's who we are._

_That was where things began to get really bad. The Elders became judgmental about how Piper and I were surviving. We weren't doing everything the "correct" and "balanced" way. We were killing more than we were protecting innocents. That's when Piper and I realized that our lives didn't matter to the Elders... the Elders who had played with our lives and our emotions for so many years... they didn't give a damn about us. They had taken two of our sisters... two deaths that they could have prevented. It was that realization that sealed the fate of so many..._

 

Cole laid the letter down again and lay on the bed, cradling Phoebe against him. It didn't matter to him that he was cradling a dead body and getting her blood all over him. Tears ran from the corners of his eyes as he held Phoebe. This woman had changed his life so much, had always given him so much strength.

 

_~One more day, One more time_  
One more sunset maybe I'd be satisfied  
But then again; I know what it would do  
Leave me wishing still, for one more day with you...~ 

 

"Phoebe..." Cole whispered as he held onto her body, not willing to let go of the one woman who stood by him through so much. She had stood against friends and family to be his wife.

 

_...Baby, did you ever watch the movie **"Terminator 2"**? Imagine Sarah Connor with weapons of magic and potions. That's what Piper and I became. We were basically guerilla witches. We knew the world was ending and that no one was going to help us but ourselves. Piper, Leo and I were waging war on both sides of the spectrum._

_We were the Warren Witches... Charlotte and Melinda had given us our powers, not the Elders. Somewhere along the line, the Elders had convinced one of our ancestors that they were needed and that they were responsible for our family having our powers. They were not and Piper and I finally knew the truth. The Elders had scammed our family for generations... and took our sisters and did nothing to help when we really needed them. They had taken everything from us, Cole. They took our sisters, the twins, Wyatt and Chris... they didn't raise a hand to help even our children as they were taken. The Elders had pulled the strings of the Warren-Halliwell line for long enough... and Piper and I cut the strings._

_We decided it was time to show the Elders and the Underworld that the **Power of Two** was just as deadly as the **Power of Three**._

_We learned... we knew how to KILL the Elders, Cole. Leo and a Darklighter we aligned ourselves with taught us to kill the Elders if they came after us..._

_...and they did come. We gave them every chance in the world to either help us or leave us alone. Instead... they stripped Leo of his wings. They did it in front of Piper, thinking it would make us do as they wished. They were so cocky and arrogant that the Head Elder came to meet with us. He tried giving us ultimatums... and Piper blew him up..._

 

Cole stared at that part of the letter in shock. _Piper had killed an Elder?! She blew up the HEAD ELDER?!_ Their lives must have indeed gotten desperate if they had been willing to take such steps into moral ambiguity. Neither woman was a wanton killer.

"Bright One," he whispered. "I'm so sorry I wasn't there. God, I should have been..." He brushed her hair back from her cooling body. He continued to smooth her hair back for a long time, afraid to read what had happened to make his wife, who was so full of life, decide to take hers in such a brutal fashion. Finally, he swallowed and continued reading.

 

_...After that, there was no going back. We had crossed the line and we were determined not to be taken down without a fight. The killing of the Elder gave us some breathing room as both sides tried to figure out what that step could mean to them... or to our alignment. The demons wanted to know if this meant they would have a chance to corrupt us and bring us under their shadow. They tried to corrupt us, and the Elders and other Whitelighters tried to guilt us into doing their bidding. They even tried bargaining with Leo... but that backfired on them... on everyone quite honestly. They gave Leo his Whitelighter status back, threatening to destroy that again if we didn't do what they wanted us to do --- foolishly risk our lives to continue to fight no-win battles in their war for dominance with the demons and the underworld. Leo did the unthinkable. Before they could strip him and destroy him, he became a Darklighter. They definitely hadn't been expecting that. Jereth (the other Darklighter that had been fighting alongside us) was more surprised than Piper and I were._

_See, we knew what Leo had been through since meeting us. The games the Elders had played with him and his existence had been horrible and despicable. He was tired of being used to harm Piper. So when the opportunity came, he became a Darklighter... and I believe that's when the Elders realized they had lost... not just us, but the entire war as well._

_We were no longer willing to be their weapon, Baby. They had taken our sisters, they had taken you, they had taken our children... we were tired of them always taking something or someone from us and never giving anything back. They had kept drawing lines in the sand... and we finally stepped over the final one._

_What was left of the Charmed Ones became the Damned Ones..._

 

Cole swallowed, reading that part of her letter again. He could almost feel the despair from Phoebe radiating off of the pieces of paper in his hand.

 

_~First thing I'd do is pray for time to crawl_  
I'd unplug the telephone, and keep the TV off  
I'd hold you every second, say a million I Love You's  
That's what I'd do, with one more day with you...~ 

 

Phoebe and Piper had gone through hell, apparently, he realized as he looked from the letter in his hand to the body of the woman he had loved for so long. There were only a few more sheets to be read, and he really wasn't sure he could handle anymore of the pain that his Bright One had gone through after his “death” or whatever had happened to him for three years. His hands were shaking as he tried to force himself to read the rest of the last letter he would ever read from the vivacious woman who had been his soul mate.

 

_It was our decision to return to the Manor that spelled the end for all of us. We were ambushed by a group of demons and Whitelighters who had banded together to kill Piper and I and hopefully steal our powers. None of us could have seen what happened next, as not even the increased amount of visions I had been having had foreseen any of this._

_A Whitelighter fired some sort of weapon at me and Jereth jumped in front of me. He died so slowly, Cole. My death would have been slower and so very painful, and I still don't understand why Jereth sacrificed his life to save mine. That's when the horror hit both Piper and I. We were going to die and there was nothing we could do about it. But, we weren't ready to go down yet._

_Leo shimmered us to the Attic and we opened the Book of Shadows. Somehow...somehow we knew it was the last time we would stand over the book together. We found the spell we were looking for when the attackers burst into the Attic. One of them grabbed Piper...the spell we were chanting, I stopped. He had Piper, the spell would kill her, too._

_"Keep chanting Phoebe!"_

_"It'll kill you, too!"_

_"We're dead if you don't finish it."_

_So, I kept chanting the spell, and so did Piper, even though she must have been in great pain. A bright light filled the attic and we were suddenly surrounded by the spirits of our ancestors, from Mom all the way back to Charlotte. Even Prue and Paige were with us, Cole. That was when I realized that we were finished here. We were all chanting the spell and there was a sudden explosion in the attic. When the smoke cleared, I was alone. Baby, even the book of shadows was gone._

_And this is how it ends, Cole. The past three years have been hell and I have lost everyone I have ever loved. I lost my heart, my soul, and my life. They took everything from me, Baby, and I am so sorry that I'm not braver, that I'm not stronger._

_I never stopped loving you, and I hope that wherever you are, you will one day forgive me for my cowardice...my exhaustion of this life. I know that I will one day be with you and my sisters again._

_Love,  
Phoebe_

 

As Cole reached the end of the letter, there was a fire burning up within him. The fire started warring with the pain he was feeling at having Phoebe ripped away from his soul. Anger was blending with pain as he folded back up the letter and placed it in his pocket.

"Phoebe, Bright One," he whispered gently as he stood and lifted her in his arms. "I'll give you the burial you deserve...and then I'll make every one of those bastards pay for what they put you through." He kissed her forehead. "Hell on Earth? They have no idea what they were talking about...but I'm happy to oblige their wish."

Cole shimmered out with Phoebe and Halliwell Manor was empty once again.


End file.
